Kā Kaupapa o te Wā
What’s On
Disruptive Landscapes: Contemporary Art from Japan
Quietly powerful and immersive video works revealing the politics behind our view of landscape.
John Vea: Ini Mini Mani Mou
Powerful new work examining the complexities of the immigration process in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Dear Shurrie
The art, influence and friendships of sculptor and teacher Francis Shurrock
E tuwhera ana te wharetoi i kā rā e 7 o te wiki, 10am - 5pm
Ka tuwhera ki te 9pm i kā pō Wenerei
Open 7 days, 10am - 5pm
Late night Wednesday until 9pm
Uruka utukore, ahokore utukore
Free entry, free wifi
Day Tripper: Over the Hills and Across the Water
A day trip to Te Waipapa/Diamond Harbour provides a great opportunity to escape the rat-in-a-maze feeling that is modern Christchurch—a feeling generated by the myriad road closures and detours and the miles of hurricane fencing that currently litter the remnants of the city. To get out amongst the harbour waters and Banks Peninsula hills is a true pleasure, even with the recent loss of one of the Peninsula’s finest buildings, Godley House in Diamond Harbour.
Direct to You From Henderson
On 11 February 2011, in a cliff-top house overlooking the Avon/Heathcote estuary in Christchurch, Michael Parekowhai offered an invitation. It was to the unveiling of his Venice biennale-bound installation, On first looking into Chapman’s Homer, to be held in Henderson, near Auckland, on 13 March. But just eleven days later, that house and the city of Christchurch were turned upside down, and the future many of those present had been looking forward to that evening was upset.
A Warehouse in a Tutu
APRIL 2011, AND THE GALLERY was occupied by CERA, Civil Defence, the City Council and a host of other city officials tasked with the immense job of tackling the destruction that had crippled our city. We’d been occupied since 22 February, and although our immediate future was uncertain, having been through this already in September 2010 (just before staging the hugely successful Ron Mueck exhibition) most staff remained positive that we’d be able to resume normal transmission sooner rather than later. So, despite awaiting internal post-quake repairs to my home, I decided to push on and take a few weeks to sand and paint my house—an old weatherboard bungalow in New Brighton that had taken decades of battering from the predominant north-easterly wind. It was hardly dilapidated, but a spruce-up was overdue. After four days on the end of an orbital sander, two days on a ladder painting the eaves and bargeboards, a week of double coating the weatherboards and another week of sills, foundations and trims I had run out of time. And I still had to get a couple of coats of enamel on the multi-pane windows—an immense amount of brushwork that was going to keep me busy for a few weekends to come. When I got back to work, however, nothing much had changed for the better in my absence. In fact, if anything, the picture was a little murkier regarding the Gallery’s reopening, and the tall apartment buildings next door were beginning to emerge as something of an elephant in the room we all now shared. Nobody really wanted to address them; they were spoken of only in hushed tones, as if silence would make the increasingly evident problem go away. We continued to make plans for new shows even as the mutterings grew in volume, and the ramifications of a potential demolition next door began to circulate. And then suddenly project managers and insurers were involved and our worst fears began to become reality. The whole collection would have to be moved.
Cities of Remembrance
Nothing was more fascinating than ruins to me when I was growing up in one of the newest parts of the New World—new, anyway, to extensive buildings and their various forms of lingering collapse and remnant. The native people of California had mostly built ephemeral structures that were readily and regularly replaced and left few traces. Anything old, anything that promised to reach into the past, was magical for me; ruins doubly so for the usual aura of romance and loss that, like death, is most alluring to the young who have not seen much of it yet.
Here and Gone
In the last issue of Bulletin, senior curator Justin Paton wrote about the way the Christchurch earthquakes 'gazumped' the exhibitions on display at the Gallery – overshadowing them and shifting their meanings. In this issue, with the Gallery still closed to the public, he considers the place of art in the wider post-quake city – and discovers a monument in an unlikely place.
Gazumped
One of the exhibitions brought to a halt by the 22 February earthquake was De-Building, which critic Warren Feeney had described only days earlier as 'Christchurch Art Gallery's finest group show since it opened in 2003'. Seven months on, the show's curator, Justin Paton, reflects on random destruction, strange echoes, critical distance, and the 'gazumping of art by life'.
Storytelling with Hanly: A show for all ages
The exhibition BLAST! Pat Hanly: the painter and his protests provides a spectacular opportunity for young and old to view the work of one of New Zealand's most cherished artists together—and for precious stories to be shared with the growing generation.
A Tale of Two Chiefs
If you have recently visited He Taonga Rangatira: Noble Treasures at the Gallery you will have been struck by Fiona Pardington's two large photographic portraits of lifelike busts of Ngāi tahu tipuna (ancestors).
De-Building
For many passers-by, Christchurch art Gallery is identified by its dramatic glass façade—the public face it presents to the world. but De-Building is an exhibition that offers a very different view. bringing together the work of fourteen artists from new Zealand and farther afield, this group exhibition draws inspiration from the working spaces gallery-goers seldom see: the workshops, loading bays and back corridors; the scruffy, half-defined zones.
Van der Velden: Otira
A first encounter with a painting by Petrus van der Velden more than twenty years ago was the start of many years of research for Gallery curator Peter Vangioni. Peter is the lead author of the Gallery's new book on van der Velden, and talks here of his fascination with the artist's Otira works.